literature-survey

literature-survey is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from a-attia/scicomp-research-skills. It costs 93 tokens per session (2,661 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A workflow for building a checked and reusable collection of research-paper references. It includes BibTeX records, published-paper PDFs, extracted text, notes for each paper, and a log of verification work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Starting or maintaining a literature review, verifying references, adding papers to a BibTeX file, and writing structured notes about each paper.
Why use it?
It helps prevent incorrect, missing, or unverified references from entering a paper's bibliography.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Starting or maintaining a literature review, verifying references, adding papers to a BibTeX file, and writing structured notes about each paper.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/a-attia/scicomp-research-skills/literature-survey
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add a-attia/scicomp-research-skills --skill literature-survey
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/a-attia/scicomp-research-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for literature-survey

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/a-attia/scicomp-research-skills/literature-survey/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/a-attia/scicomp-research-skills/literature-survey)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/a-attia/scicomp-research-skills/literature-survey"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/a-attia/scicomp-research-skills/literature-survey/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for literature-survey

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/a-attia/scicomp-research-skills/literature-survey"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/a-attia/scicomp-research-skills/literature-survey.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 93 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,661 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 4 findings, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Rogue Agent · line 38
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
  • medium Agent Snooping · line 205
    Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.
    Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
  • medium Agent Snooping · line 235
    Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.
    Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
  • medium Agent Snooping · line 240
    Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.
    Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00093 $0.02661
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.01331
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00532
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00266

Measured 12d ago against content hash 967156abae6a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

literature-survey scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/literature-survey/SKILL.md · 263 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 263 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Literature Survey

When to load this skill

Load this skill when the user is:

  • starting a new research paper that needs a literature review
  • adding new references to an existing paper
  • migrating an unverified BibTeX file to a verified one
  • doing a deep-read pass on a set of references and producing per-paper notes
  • needing a reproducible record of which references have been verified vs which are still placeholders

Overview

A research paper's bibliography drives credibility. Stale, mis-attributed, or unverified entries embarrass the author at submission time. This skill defines a 5-step workflow for building a verified literature corpus and a deliverables structure that future-you (or a collaborator) can audit and extend.

The five steps:

  1. Add a verified BibTeX entry to references/bibliography.bib.
  2. Drop the published-manuscript PDF into references/pdf/<citekey>.pdf.
  3. Generate a text extraction for AI consumption.
  4. Write a survey note notes/survey_<citekey>.md.
  5. Append a row to references/_collection_log.md.

Each step is described in detail below, plus the directory layout, the survey-note template, and the collection-log template.

Directory layout

<paper-repo>/
  references/
    bibliography.bib          -- BibTeX (tracked); every entry verified
    _collection_log.md        -- per-paper verification status + corrections + notes
    pdf/                      -- published-manuscript PDFs (gitignored)
      <citekey>.pdf
      <citekey>-supp.pdf      -- supplementary material where applicable
      .txt/                   -- pdftotext -layout extractions (gitignored)
        <citekey>.txt
  notes/
    survey_<citekey>.md       -- per-paper survey note (~30-50 lines)
    README.md                 -- index of survey notes (by section, by affinity)

The references/pdf/ directory and its .txt/ cache should be gitignored; the bibtex + collection log + survey notes are tracked.

Step 1: Verified BibTeX entry

Add the entry to references/bibliography.bib. Required fields: must include venue + page numbers + DOI or arXiv ID. Reject placeholder entries (e.g. "Author, A. (year). Title. Some Venue. [VERIFY]"); these go in a separate "pending" section of the bib file or are tagged with note = {pending verification}.

Read the full file on GitHub · 263 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 263 lines · 93 tokens per session scan A 967156abae6a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

literature-survey is a skill published in the GitHub repository a-attia/scicomp-research-skills (11 stars, last pushed 8d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 93 tokens to every session and 2,661 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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